You build a LinkedIn profile recruiters find by writing it around the words they search for, not the words you would use to describe yourself. Recruiters do not browse LinkedIn. They run keyword searches on job title, skill and location, then scan the results. If your headline, your About section and your job titles do not contain the terms they type, you are invisible no matter how good you are.
That is the part most people get wrong. They treat LinkedIn as an online resume. It is closer to a search engine that happens to have your face on it.
My recruiters at CPG have been sourcing across 25+ industries in Canada and the US since 2020. We open hundreds of profiles a week. The ones that get a message back have a few things in common, and none of them are complicated.
What makes a LinkedIn profile show up in recruiter searches?
A LinkedIn profile shows up in recruiter searches when the exact job titles and skills a recruiter would type appear in your headline, your current job title, your About section and your skills list. LinkedIn weights those fields heavily, and it matches on literal words, not on meaning.
So if your title is Growth Ninja, you will never appear in a search for Marketing Manager. If you are a millwright but your profile says maintenance technician, you miss every millwright search in the province. Use the boring, standard, searchable version of your title. Save the personality for the writing.
Three fields do most of the work:
- Headline. The single most weighted field, and the one line that appears next to your name everywhere on the platform.
- Current job title. Recruiters filter on this constantly. Make it the industry-standard name for what you do.
- Skills. Add the specific tools and certifications by name. AutoCAD. CPA. Salesforce. Red Seal. Recruiters search on these directly.
Location matters more than people expect. A blank or vague location field drops you out of every geographically filtered search, and most searches are geographically filtered.
What should your LinkedIn headline actually say?
Your LinkedIn headline should say what you do, who you do it for, and one thing you are known for, in that order. The default headline LinkedIn gives you is just your current job title at your current company, which tells a recruiter almost nothing and wastes the most valuable field on your profile.
Compare these two. Sales Representative at Acme Ltd. Versus Industrial Sales Representative | Automotive and Manufacturing | Southwestern Ontario. The second one contains four separate terms a recruiter might search, and it tells me in one glance whether to open it.
Do not write Seeking New Opportunities as your headline. It burns your best keyword real estate on information that helps nobody find you, and it says nothing about what you are good at.
What should go in your About section?
Your About section should open with one sentence naming your role and specialty, then give three to five short paragraphs of what you actually deliver, and close with how to reach you. Write it in first person. Third-person bios read like a press release nobody asked for.
The first two lines are the only ones visible before the See More cut. Put your searchable terms there, not a quote about passion.
Then get concrete. Not results-driven professional with a proven track record. That sentence describes nobody. Instead: what you manage, what size, in what industry, and what changed because you were there. Numbers you can actually stand behind. If you cut a lead time, say by how much. If you ran a territory, say how big.
Recruiters do not browse LinkedIn. They search it. Write for the search.
How should you write your experience section?
Write each experience entry as two or three lines of scope followed by two or three bullets of outcome, and never copy your job description into it. A job description says what you were responsible for. A recruiter wants to know what happened while you held the job.
Scope means the facts: team size, budget, territory, product line, reporting line. Outcome means the change: what you built, fixed, grew, saved or shipped.
Fill in the older roles too, even the ones you think are irrelevant. Gaps make recruiters ask questions, and completeness is one of the signals LinkedIn uses when ranking profiles. The same discipline applies to your resume, which we broke down in how to write a resume that gets you hired.
Does your photo and banner really matter?
Your photo matters because profiles without one get opened far less often, and your banner matters because it is free space almost nobody uses. A recruiter deciding between two similar profiles will click the one with a face on it. That is not fair, it is just what happens.
You do not need a professional shoot. You need a clear, well-lit, head-and-shoulders photo where you look like a person someone would meet at work. A phone against a plain wall in daylight is enough. Replace the default grey banner with anything relevant to your industry.
Do you need to post on LinkedIn to get found?
No. You do not need to post on LinkedIn to be found by recruiters, because recruiter search runs on your profile fields, not your activity feed. Posting helps in a different way: it gives people who land on your profile a reason to believe you know your field, and it keeps you in front of your own network.
If you have no interest in posting, do not force it. A complete, keyword-accurate profile with an empty feed beats a busy feed attached to a half-finished profile every single time. If you do want to post, one useful thing about your actual work each week is plenty.
What mistakes kill an otherwise good profile?
The mistakes that kill a good LinkedIn profile are almost all self-inflicted and take minutes to fix. Here is what we see most often at CPG:
- A clever job title nobody searches for.
- An empty About section, or one written in the third person.
- No location, or a country instead of a city.
- Experience entries pasted straight from the job description.
- Messages left unread for two weeks, so by the time you reply the role is closed.
- A profile that contradicts the resume you send, which is the fastest way to lose trust.
That last one comes up more than you would think. Dates, titles and employers have to match across both documents. If they do not, a recruiter has to ask, and asking is friction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should you turn on the Open to Work setting?
Turn on Open to Work, but use the recruiters-only setting rather than the green photo frame if you are currently employed. The recruiters-only option signals your availability inside LinkedIn Recruiter without broadcasting it to your employer or your network. If you are not currently working, the public green frame costs you nothing and can help.
How often should you update your LinkedIn profile?
Update your LinkedIn profile whenever your role, scope or skills change, and review the whole thing once or twice a year even when nothing has changed. The worst time to build a profile is the week you need it, because you will be rushing and you will have forgotten the details that make you look good.
Do endorsements and recommendations actually matter?
Recommendations matter, endorsements barely do. A written recommendation from a former manager or client is real evidence that someone will vouch for you, and recruiters read them. Skill endorsements are mostly reciprocal clicking between people who have never worked together, and experienced recruiters discount them almost entirely.
Is LinkedIn Premium worth paying for as a job seeker?
LinkedIn Premium is not necessary to get hired, and it does not make you rank higher in recruiter searches. What it buys you is InMail credits to contact people directly and visibility into who viewed your profile. If you are running an active, targeted search and will use those features, it can be worth a month or two. Fix your profile first.
If you want the rest of the picture, we cover the search itself in how to stand out in a job search, what happens on our side of the desk in what a recruiter actually does, and the conversation that follows in interview tips for job seekers.
Updated August 2026.
Fix the profile, then get in front of people who are actually hiring. Get in touch with CPG Recruitment and tell us what you do and where you want to be. We place people across Canada and the US, and we will tell you straight whether your profile is doing you any favours.